March 2010
9 posts
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Susan Orlean and the art of the start
Why do I so admire Susan Orlean’s writing? Plenty of reasons. One big one: the way she begins. Here, for example, are the first four sentences of a 2002 piece I’d missed until today:
Hervé Halfon, a French person who hates French people, owns a record store on the Rue des Plantes, in Montparnasse, just a few Métro stops from the Eiffel Tower but spiritually closer to Avenue Gambela, in...
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“Eric Schlosser should get out a yellow highlighter and mark the passages of my...”
– - Caitlin Flanagan in the March issue of The Atlantic, responding to Schlosser’s published letter criticizing her loathsome article, “Cultivating Failure” in the January issue of The Atlantic.
So how would anyone get the loony idea that Flanagan thinks the school-gardens program is racist?...
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Fiction Then Stranger
Tonight Lorrie Moore regained her place at the head of the line of writers I haven’t read enough. So before taking my dog for a run, I jumped on the web to search for a free and legal download of a Lorrie Moore story to put on my iPod. In a minute or two, I found this New Yorker podcast of Louise Erdrich reading Moore’s story “Dance in America.” I listened to it twice...
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“Jason Epstein launched the trade paperback format in the US in 1952 as a young...”
– from the bio of the man who wrote this NYRB piece called “Publishing: The Revolutionary Future.”
I was minus-20 years old in 1952, so I grew up in a world in which trade paperbacks were just a given. It somehow never occurred to me that anybody had to launch them into existence. I...